|
Post by NoSuchMethod on Mar 28, 2019 14:54:12 GMT
No last thoughts/updates/news from the CID the last 2 weeks? I assume it's closed now. It is. I've got mixed feelings. On the one hand, they did finally get the summoning mechanic to a point where it actually makes sense within the framework of the game. You have to sacrifice a solo every time you summon, the summoned horror appears in the location of the sacrificed summon, and the new summon forfeits its combat action. Significantly weaker, but also significantly less unrestrained insanity. In return, the Horrors on average got buffed. That part feels good to me.
The downside is, since it took the entire CID to get the core mechanics untangled, the rest of the faction didn't really get a fair shake. Almost nobody got more than a game or two in with the final version of the rules, so power levels of the casters and various solos are still all over the map. I had the sense the faction came out of CID in about the state it should have been going in.
|
|
|
Post by paradox on Mar 28, 2019 15:05:51 GMT
No last thoughts/updates/news from the CID the last 2 weeks? I assume it's closed now. It is. I've got mixed feelings. On the one hand, they did finally get the summoning mechanic to a point where it actually makes sense within the framework of the game. You have to sacrifice a solo every time you summon, the summoned horror appears in the location of the sacrificed summon, and the new summon forfeits its combat action. Significantly weaker, but also significantly less unrestrained insanity. In return, the Horrors on average got buffed. That part feels good to me.
The downside is, since it took the entire CID to get the core mechanics untangled, the rest of the faction didn't really get a fair shake. Almost nobody got more than a game or two in with the final version of the rules, so power levels of the casters and various solos are still all over the map. I had the sense the faction came out of CID in about the state it should have been going in.
Week 3.3 summoning is trash compared to Week 1.3. The CID wasted two weeks where it could have balanced a fun, strong mechnic to work like the dev write-ups. Instead the team caved to kneejerk screaming and we wasted the last two weeks doing stuff that should been sorted in a closed alpha before the cycle started. Now, we’re hoping this dumpster fire sorts itself out in fine tuning before release. The big picture idea of solo sacrifice summoning is cool, Ill give you. But where it stands as of CID close is a rough pile of shit game design thats all kinds of boring and uncompelling. But Week 1.3 summoning was fun. Strong, yes, but close enough to balance over two more weeks. Its a shame players panicked and the devs caved.
|
|
snot
Light Addition
Posts: 63
|
Post by snot on Mar 28, 2019 15:38:07 GMT
What was the 1.3 summoning?
|
|
|
Post by NoSuchMethod on Mar 28, 2019 16:10:53 GMT
Week 3.3 summoning is trash compared to Week 1.3. The CID wasted two weeks where it could have balanced a fun, strong mechnic to work like the dev write-ups. Instead the team caved to kneejerk screaming and we wasted the last two weeks doing stuff that should been sorted in a closed alpha before the cycle started. Now, we’re hoping this dumpster fire sorts itself out in fine tuning before release. The big picture idea of solo sacrifice summoning is cool, Ill give you. But where it stands as of CID close is a rough pile of shit game design thats all kinds of boring and uncompelling. But Week 1.3 summoning was fun. Strong, yes, but close enough to balance over two more weeks. Its a shame players panicked and the devs caved. We're gonna have to agree to disagree on that one. I don't think there's any way you could have balanced Week 1.3, even if you had the rest of your life to do it. It's not even a power level thing (and no argument, it WAS fun), it's a scaling issue. You run in to that any time the you have an ability creating effective points-on-the-table disconnected from actual game size. Thags1 resurrecting a carnivean or Goreshade feating in a min unit of banes are examples. Those feats are unbalanceable. They've been problematic for three editions. The "solution" has been to make them only-sorta-OP for small games, resulting in them being limp at 75. With Week 1.3, they would have eventually had to do that to the entire infernal faction. From the way things were headed, I'm guessing cultists would eventually have gotten so expensive and/or hard to use that it would hamstring the whole mechanic, and then it would be "balanced".
Understand, you can't compare it to most abilities that "create" models. Most recursion and new-model-creating abilities don't run in to that fundamental issue, because the scaling is implicit. You can only recur things that have died, so the ability's power is tied to the number of models in your list. You need enemy souls or corpses to create models, so again it's locked to the number of them your opponent brings along. The only physical limit summoning was tied to was cultist availability, and they were never rare enough to be significant bottleneck. That's what sacrificing a solo adds to the mechanic - it ties summoning to a finite, model-based resource. That mechanical connection makes the ability scale with the game, which then gives you a starting point to balance it. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
Now, to your point about "we wasted weeks doing stuff that should been sorted in a closed alpha before the cycle started", yeah, preach it. It's hard to look at the Week 1.0 release and believe it got significant internal testing. They basically reinvented the faction before our eyes over the course of the CID.
|
|
|
Post by paradox on Mar 28, 2019 16:15:12 GMT
Do you also lose to Amon dervishes?
|
|
bundeez
Junior Strategist
Posts: 325
|
Post by bundeez on Mar 28, 2019 18:04:55 GMT
Interesting, thanks for the update.
Sounds like a significant step towards a more balanced rule for summoning. The 60 free points mentioned previously got me a little concerned..
|
|
|
Post by davycannonhound on Mar 28, 2019 19:26:06 GMT
So, based off of what I've been reading in the PDF... Would I be correct in saying that Infernals are Legion 2.0? They seem like the glass cannon I've always wanted Legion to be, but I could be wrong: I haven't actually had the chance to try them out yet (been too busy to even think about playing the game, recently).
|
|
thelat
Junior Strategist
Posts: 480
|
Post by thelat on Mar 28, 2019 19:48:09 GMT
So, based off of what I've been reading in the PDF... Would I be correct in saying that Infernals are Legion 2.0? They seem like the glass cannon I've always wanted Legion to be, but I could be wrong: I haven't actually had the chance to try them out yet (been too busy to even think about playing the game, recently). Legion player here. I don't really feel like Infernals have any connection to Legion in any of the editions. The main thing about Legion was skirting the rules, which we do a lot less of now. The horrors aren't particularly glass or cannon. They feel more like Cryx to me, but focused on warjacks. The main theme of Infernals seems to be that Infernals are hungry.
|
|
|
Post by NoSuchMethod on Mar 28, 2019 20:50:29 GMT
So, based off of what I've been reading in the PDF... Would I be correct in saying that Infernals are Legion 2.0? They seem like the glass cannon I've always wanted Legion to be, but I could be wrong: I haven't actually had the chance to try them out yet (been too busy to even think about playing the game, recently). Legion player here. I don't really feel like Infernals have any connection to Legion in any of the editions. The main thing about Legion was skirting the rules, which we do a lot less of now. The horrors aren't particularly glass or cannon. They feel more like Cryx to me, but focused on warjacks. The main theme of Infernals seems to be that Infernals are hungry. To illuminate the claim a bit, a few people in the CID were comparing them to Legion on the basis of the Infernal heavies being on the carnivean chassis. You'd keep seeing variations of conversations like:
A: "the heavies are so squishy, this is TERRIBLE" B: "well, they're basically as durable as a carnivean" A: "a carnivean is not exactly durable..." B: "they also have long threat range and hit real hard, LIKE A CARNIVEAN" B: "I just realized infernals are basically legion 2.0"
I'm guessing that's what the other guy was referring to
|
|
|
Post by paradox on Mar 29, 2019 0:05:00 GMT
People also walked things blithley into known threat ranges, then acted surprised by taking heavies to the face. Meanwhile, I have a list with a 17” non-linear threat Fire of Salvation, including 3 non-activation move/place effects. At effective MAT11 PS23.
So other lists easily do the same things Infernals did at Week 1.3. Except the threats were not from the casters own base, making them safer to employ. The CID was a shitshow. The lack of creativity or adaptability on the part of the players was disappointing. The speed at which the devs caved was demoralizing.
Now we have a pretty rote, limited faction with mild intereting concepts and horrible execution, and little to no fine testing.
|
|
|
Post by overmind on Mar 29, 2019 4:33:57 GMT
I actually felt the concepts ended up coming out quite well. I was leery of the last week summoning but found it fun on the table. I still think it needed another week or two though, we just barely got the summoning in a good spot, let alone the whole rest of the faction.
Thankfully they said some form of 'Heart of Darkness' was returning in the Oblivion CID so maybe we'll have a chance to get more testing on most of the faction (not the heavies or masters but still something).
|
|
|
Post by Cuckoo on Mar 29, 2019 8:53:28 GMT
The overwhelming feeling of the CID was that is was rushed. The reasons for having such a short CID were essentially logistical as they just started it at a stupidity time.
Biggest concerns: >> only 3 masters >> entire CID was just on summoning. The cost is very high on your list design/support bloat and in equally in game without showing much meaningful power level in the battle reports. Just felt very boring. >> I didn’t get the impression that infernals really brought any challenge to the board as summoning was very easily contained by the end >> devs seemed overwhelmingly more excited by the archons and other oblivion stuff in their final Feb chat so not convinced much will change despite the very short CID
Reasonably worried that they have just been done very shoddily due to all the other stuff related to Oblivion. Going by Grymkin in comparison - the faction testing/prep by designers seems very minimal
|
|
|
Post by Cuckoo on Mar 29, 2019 9:00:27 GMT
In addition to the above, it felt like the entire faction didn’t bring a strong alpha or a strong level of attrition.
You get the impression they are supposed to win quickly due to their poor attrition and self-cannibalising but none of the battle reports showed the punch to be able to do that.
Just sounded like everyone was just about holding on in their games but not in a fun way.
|
|
|
Post by NoSuchMethod on Mar 29, 2019 14:11:32 GMT
People also walked things blithley into known threat ranges, then acted surprised by taking heavies to the face. Meanwhile, I have a list with a 17” non-linear threat Fire of Salvation, including 3 non-activation move/place effects. At effective MAT11 PS23. So other lists easily do the same things Infernals did at Week 1.3. Except the threats were not from the casters own base, making them safer to employ. The CID was a shitshow. The lack of creativity or adaptability on the part of the players was disappointing. The speed at which the devs caved was demoralizing. Now we have a pretty rote, limited faction with mild intereting concepts and horrible execution, and little to no fine testing. We're moving the goalposts a bit here. The threat range issue created by summoning is distinct from the underlying economy. That's more part of the "effectiveness of horrors" side of the equation than the "cost of horrors" side. Worrying about the performance of the actual horror model before you've got the core engine turning over is failing to see the forest for the trees.
Now to threat ranges - I personally have no objection to them having a combat action on principle. I think we're in agreement that the initial version (Omo threatening over 9000 with incorp and synergy) was over the top. 1.3 was if I recall when they went to summoning in the control phase. I don't take any issue with having summoned horrors being able to charge, if that's what you're arguing. As you say, they are predictable threats. But that's surface-level stuff. Week 1.3 had much deeper, fundamental issues that could not be patched by any change to the effectiveness of the horror models themselves. It took until Week 3 for the devs to make any significant headway in that department.
@cuckoo - "Rushed" is definitely a word I'd use, yeah
|
|
|
Post by paradox on Mar 29, 2019 14:38:45 GMT
People also walked things blithley into known threat ranges, then acted surprised by taking heavies to the face. Meanwhile, I have a list with a 17” non-linear threat Fire of Salvation, including 3 non-activation move/place effects. At effective MAT11 PS23. So other lists easily do the same things Infernals did at Week 1.3. Except the threats were not from the casters own base, making them safer to employ. The CID was a shitshow. The lack of creativity or adaptability on the part of the players was disappointing. The speed at which the devs caved was demoralizing. Now we have a pretty rote, limited faction with mild intereting concepts and horrible execution, and little to no fine testing. We're moving the goalposts a bit here. The threat range issue created by summoning is distinct from the underlying economy. That's more part of the "effectiveness of horrors" side of the equation than the "cost of horrors" side. Worrying about the performance of the actual horror model before you've got the core engine turning over is failing to see the forest for the trees.
Now to threat ranges - I personally have no objection to them having a combat action on principle. I think we're in agreement that the initial version (Omo threatening over 9000 with incorp and synergy) was over the top. 1.3 was if I recall when they went to summoning in the control phase. I don't take any issue with having summoned horrors being able to charge, if that's what you're arguing. As you say, they are predictable threats. But that's surface-level stuff. Week 1.3 had much deeper, fundamental issues that could not be patched by any change to the effectiveness of the horror models themselves. It took until Week 3 for the devs to make any significant headway in that department.
@cuckoo - "Rushed" is definitely a word I'd use, yeah
1. Ive moved no goal posts. This is the same position Ive held since we got into Week 2 of the CID. 2. Week 1.3 was totally workable and just needed fine tuning to the pieces themselves. The dev teams reach to ratchet cultists points alone was a poor, heavy handed attempt at balance, without consideration of any other possible options. Further, there was no real testing of essence economy after the Week 1.3 update. We got Week 2 and it all got flushed. So youre flat wrong about balance issues.
|
|